All military quarters provided only temporary accommodation. And military families lived as though they were camping within their house. Some of these families trashed their billets, turned them into tips that anticipated crack dens. My parents’ friend Len Gill was Southern Command’s land agent before he was promoted to the even less enviable post of BAOR’s land agent. He recounted with grim gusto countless tales of the domestic sordor achieved by even the highest ranks, especially by the highest ranks. I was fascinated and repulsed by the experience of some people who took over a letting and discovered that what looked like a heavy grey rubber mat beneath the oven was in fact a two-inch-deep deposit of cooking grease.
The Worrins’ house was hardly furnished, meagrely carpeted, sparsely curtained. It looked as though they were in the process of moving in or moving out. Their perennially provisional life did not depress them. They were amiable, merry and talented: as my parents constantly reminded me, Jonathan, a year my junior, had learnt to blow his nose whilst I still snivelled lavishly and sprouted a seagreen moustache. Major Worrin was extrovert, hearty, back-slapping, uncomplaining, unreflective and aptly nicknamed Tigger. I was disappointed when they moved to far-distant Harrogate where he was seconded to the Army Apprentices School.
I was even more disappointed when Tigger reappeared some four years later, shortly after my tenth birthday. An early Saturday evening in February, coal fire in the sitting room, hot buttered toast and Patum Peperium, the maroon velvet curtain to my father’s den pulled shut for snugness. Though unexpected he was jovially welcomed. I was initially delighted to see him. Then I squatted on a leather pouffe to watch an early edition of Six-Five Special, the first pop music show on British television. Its titles comprised a steam engine hauling the supposedly eponymous train and a corny song whose chorus was ‘over the points, over the points’ repeated four times. The presenters Pete Murray and Jo Douglas were embarrassing: even a ten-year-old winced at the cataract of self-conscious hep-cat drivel. Freddie Mills was goofily troubling. Much of the skiffle and trad jazz was dreary. Tommy Steele wasn’t. He was exciting and cheeky. He came on at the end of the show to sing ‘Singing the Blues’, then my favourite song: it has displaced ‘Mountain Greenery’, which I had heard at the Rep’s panto where the principal boy had been dressed in velvet of a green that I took to be mountain green. But I could hardly hear ‘Singing the Blues’ for Tigger’s whisky’d ranting about how this common little yob, been in the Merchant Navy, the Merchant Navy, had been spared National Service simply so he could sing his common little songs which would destroy the fabric of the nation and confirm the ruddy Communist bloc’s conviction of western decadence.
Those who had been through the war had known fear and horrors and the proximity of mortality. They had looked the four last things in the face. They had every right to behave as they did and to expect more of their pampered children, every right to despise the minoritarian tyrannies of PC, anti-racism, the compensation culture, the euphemistic society etc. They knew eschatology at first hand rather than as a theological concept.
This was my first taste of what would soon be trumpeted as ‘the generation gap’: good timing, no doubt, for ‘Singing the Blues’ was the first pop song that appealed to me. I had not yet heard Elvis Presley, Charlie Gracie, Buddy Holly. I doubt that I’d even heard of them. Before Tommy Steele there had been Lynn’s copy of ‘The Ballad of High Noon’ by Frankie Laine. My father had a few Inkspots records and a couple by Bing Crosby but rarely played them. With the exception of ‘St James Infirmary’, my mother’s extensive collection of Louis Armstrong was also largely mute. Uncle Hank would sometimes put ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’, presumably by Burl Ives, on the curiously assembled turntable in Evesham’s dining-room cupboard. And I loved to be frightened by Henry Hall’s ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’.
Comedians and comic actors were accorded a sort of respect: Al Read, Ted Ray, Charlie Drake, Benny Hill, Ted Lune, Bill Maynard, Eric Sykes, Hylda Baker, Alfie Bass, Michael Medwin, Bob Monkhouse (even though he was on the smooth side), Jimmy Edwards, Dick Bentley, June Whitfield, Tony Hancock, Sid James, Hugh Paddick, Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Horne, Hattie Jacques, George Cole with Percy Edwards as Psyche The Dog in A Life of Bliss and, in later years, Stanley Baxter, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Marty Feldman, Dick Emery, Les Dawson.
Most popular music was dismissed and mocked. Edmund Hockridge and Donald Peers excited a special scorn and were deprecated as ‘full fruit’ – I agreed, though I had no idea why that expression, so far as I know peculiar to my father, should signify a particular kind of treacly light operatic baritone. I still have no idea.
Musicals and light orchestral music were abhorred. Rose-Marie and South Pacific, Mantovani, Cyril Stapleton, Eric ‘Little Pig’ Robinson, Jack Payne, Shirley Abicair, Eve Boswell, Malcolm Vaughan, The Mudlarks, Dennis Lotis, The Dallas Boys, Salisbury’s own Rosemary Squires, the unfortunate Dorothy Squires, The Stargazers, Dickie Valentine. My parents considered them all trivial beyond contempt. Light entertainers and song and dancemen too: Bruce Forsyth, Dickie Henderson, Norman Vaughan. The Range Rider’s sidekick, the grinning All-American Boy Dick West and the bonhomous children’s telly presenter Ross Salmon, who used to address ‘chaps and chapesses’, caused my father to wonder why we have to share a planet with such people. I shared my parents’ contempt. I absorbed their taste.
That compact would soon be shredded by former truckers with DAs, leather boys on the lam from slums, delinquent hairdressers, the slide guitar of smalltown Lotharios.
And Tigger, confronted by the unstoppable tide of teen, would turn into Eeyore. I didn’t see him again after that evening in 1957 but my parents kept in touch. They would meet up infrequently. I would receive reports of Tigger’s raging at the world, of his fury that Jonathan was now a long-haired lefty. My parents’ attitude to my foibles was, on the contrary, sanguine, expressed most forcibly in the advice that ‘you’ll probably grow out of it’ – whatever it was.
STEWART? STUART? JOHN?
My mother’s boyfriend of her early twenties. A fellow student or maybe teacher at University College, Southampton: he is gowned in formal group photographs with her. I only learnt of his existence from a photo I found after her death. I asked her sister Mary who he was.
Stuart/Stewart – almost certainly.
But on the verso in some he is John in soft pencil.
Not John. Mary was certain that she had never had a boyfriend called John before she met my father.
In 1932 they were in Southsea High Street, a sojourn in a different town captured by a street photographer. He wears a thin moustache, a full head of gleaming Marcel’d hair, waisted jacket, Oxford bags – a bit late in the day for those, surely. Her expression is that of a woman in love. Whatever happened to him? Whatever happened to gleaming Marcel’d hair?
At Mary’s funeral their crabby cousin from Bournemouth, grudge-bearing Dorothy Bolton (née Janda), whom I’d never previously met, told me, accusatorily, that as a child she had resented that on several occasions she had had to give up her bed to my mother and her boyfriend who played in a jazz band. Was this Stewart/Stuart or John moonlighting with a cornet? Or another lover? The cousin couldn’t remember his name.
‘Stuart?’
She shrugged and hit the tea.
‘John?’
She bit a biscuit.
She had borne this rancour for getting on seventy years. She had a lot to get off her chest. She had married late in life, another of these embittered virgins no doubt. She exuded spite, bile, moralistic superiority. I shrugged: I was not my dead mother’s keeper before I was born. The old bitch contorted her biscuity mouth. I was relieved never to have met her before. Indeed I had not been aware of her sanctimonious existence. She was the daughter of Nesta Hogg, my grandfather’s sister, and her husband Joe Janda, a tailor who claimed to be Christian rather than Jewish and despite his surname to be Viennese rather than Czech. Vienna enjoyed a certain cachet in Britain in the earlier
twentieth century, indeed still enjoyed it long after it rolled over to let Hitler fondle it. There was, after all, a ladies’ hairdresser in Salisbury called Hans of Vienna; this was a crimper who hedged his bets, he was also Hans of Bond Street.
The Jandas’ other child was a son, Dennis, a sometime Bournemouth school teacher whom I have never met. I had heard of him, but only because of his sexual demeanour. His first marriage was annulled due to non-consummation. And so was his second marriage – which was rather overdoing it. This was a matter of comical wonder to my parents. Third time lucky, Dennis married a woman called Phyllis. They produced a son, Howard, another Bournemouth school teacher, whom I have of course never met.
SUBTERRANEAN
The distant past is always with us. Around Salisbury it is inescapable. The extent of the inhabited past is greater than anywhere else in Europe. It stretches over horizon upon horizon.
This is where British archaeology was born in the seventeenth century, out of an intellectual curiosity about English antiquity prompted by the multiple interventions in the landscape. A taste for the past is not elemental – it has to be learnt. As a child growing up in the midst of this ancientness I was persistently encouraged to awe, to humility, to pride in the precious patrimony that surrounded me. For a long time I was unable to summon those properties. I just didn’t get it. I failed in what was presented to me as a duty.
Then, when I was eight, an elderly gardener’s hand was pierced by a rose thorn. He contracted tetanus. He died. Lockjaw. The inquest fascinated me. The thorn was rumoured to be a vector of tetanus because of the bodies buried millennia ago beneath the garden in Breamore where the deadly rose grew. The very earth was contaminated by chemical ghosts. The past was present. The dead were with us still, they were active from the grave, they were adding to their number, recruiting with poisons seeping from their long decomposition.
I began to get it. The loose notion of the past was illumined by specificity, physicality. For all its wretchedness and ill fortune the old man’s death was touched by mystery from deep strata. I didn’t know that, given the multiplicity of their hosts, tetanus spores were ubiquitous. So this rumoured diagnosis might be scientifically dubious. But even had I known I’d have been unwilling to discount the satisfying and simple tale. Faith, or wishfulness, would have trumped fact. That, as I say, is what faith does.
Above Breamore near the tawny groves of Great Yews and beside the gallops there is a dense clump of blackthorn. Beneath the bushes are just discernible a building’s ruinous foundations. I pored over a large-scale OS map. The house which had stood here was called Vanity. The name made me shiver. I thought of Milady de Winter, of venom and plots, of damask hangings, dark carvings, vast curtains swelling like a man-o’-war’s foresails. Why was such a house isolated on the high downs with clouds and skylarks when all the others were sheltered in valleys or declivities? These downs west of the Avon valley above Breamore form the edge of Cranborne Chase. Here is the Mizmaze, a turf labyrinth whose purpose may have been no more than decorative, though it is of course routinely connected to pagan rites: where isn’t? Its vaguely ‘Celtic’ pattern resembles that of an infuriating game in a glass-topped box whose end was to coax a tiny ball-bearing between ridges to a slot in the centre. I could not master it. I railed at my clumsiness. This is an area dense with barrows: Knaps Barrow, Grans Barrow, the Giant’s Grave, the Duck’s Nest. There are field systems, strip lynchets, tumuli, castle keeps. Fortresses moulded from flinty chalky earth are announced by clumps of beeches whose roots are witches’ claws: Castle Ditches, Soldier’s Ring, Clearbury Ring. Here are Bokerley Dyke and Grim’s Ditch. Grim is a name of the devil: the walls and the trench between them will repulse him. These sites were forever being excavated. Vessels, blades, tools, lumps of rust and shards of leather, cloth, beads, arrowheads, tiles, pipes, bones, rings, cooking utensils, bracelets, seeds and tesserae were exhumed with bounteous abandon.
The majority of excavations were undertaken by the Ministry of Works or supposedly responsible archaeological faculties and societies. Nonetheless over certain digs there still hung a hint of the chase, a suspicion of pillage. The earth was violated as it had been by early antiquaries and would be again by hick chancers armed with metal detectors – that is, by indiscriminate collectors, looters of the past who sought trophies as though participating in a subterranean lottery. The Roman villa at Rockbourne was intermittently excavated over two decades by Morley Hewitt, a Fordingbridge estate agent, a well-intentioned amateur with sparse knowledge of then current field-archaeological practices. During the war he had bought the land after a tip-off from a man whose rabbiting ferret had uncovered tiles and oyster shells. It was his fiefdom to uncover as he willed. When he began excavations in the 1950s the practices of scientific archaeology proselytised by R. G. Collingwood as long ago as the 1920s were still in the future for want of an appropriate technology. But Morley Hewitt’s dig lacked even the rigour applied by General Augustus Pitt-Rivers in the 1880s. Hewitt’s helpers were enthusiastic tyros: schoolchildren, students, farm workers, families on outings, ramblers. Procedures were lax, finds were haphazardly recorded. Nonetheless objects that had been occluded for over a thousand years were brought to light even if the particular stratum from which they were dredged was ignored, so debasing their value as data.
One deliriously happy afternoon in August 1964 I climbed with some friends to the top of the monument erected to a member of the Eyre Coote family of West Park in the early c19. West Park House itself had yet to be demolished. Twenty miles south, the Isle of Wight and the dazzling Channel were visible. And all around the Roman villa swarmed an inchoate formic army, putting on a fine show of endeavour and sweat.
When Hampshire County Council adopted the villa in the late 1970s its archaeological department backfilled parts of the site in the name of preservation. It covered it beneath turf. Why? To appease the shades of Roman colonists? Out of respect for a past – a temporal abstraction, after all – which is incapable of acknowledging or reciprocating that respect?
Antiquarian pillage is hardly scholarly and far from scientific, but its perpetrators were not culpable of a misanthropic relativism which grants rights to ancient amphorae and entitlements to yokes’ remnants. Nor did they conceive of history in terms of movements, big ideas and sweeping theses. Their empiricism militated against generalisation. The further scientific-archaeological method has abandoned antiquarianism’s delinquency, the more emphasis it has laid on understanding context through the gathering of information rather than through the coarse acquisition of objects: indeed the objects may often remain in situ, like fish thrown back in the river, like tagged birds which will never know an aviary. It was, however, that coarse acquisition which fascinated me in the museums I frequented as a child.
The Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham was in a Pitt-Rivers’s village, deep in the thousands of Pitt-Rivers Acres, an hour or so from Salisbury on my metallic carmine and cream Raleigh Space Rider (note the American tan saddle and friable caramel plastic handlebar grips). A stitch-inducing slog there past the deep dry valley which I had identified as the Valley of the Shadow of Death. A thrilling return with a southwesterly at one’s back and mewing buzzards circling overhead. Farnham is a small and remote village. The museum occupied a dour former schoolhouse built for gypsy children whose truancy soon rendered it redundant. It was doubtless their descendants who camped on the Old Shaftesbury Drove near Dogdean. The school was distinguished from countless others only by its multitude of insipidly Tudorish extensions. On Sundays Pitt-Rivers would send charabancs and carriages to Salisbury, Shaftesbury and Blandford to fetch the populace so that it might recreate itself at the alluring pleasure gardens called the Larmer Tree Grounds and inspect his ethnological and archaeological collections rather than attend church services. This was a pedagogic, improving programme: every exhibit was meticulously described and the pleasure gardens were instructionally decorated with pavilions in exotic architectural styles. Thos
e with the means to do so could stay at the Museum Hotel, built expressly to that end rather than as a public house. It may during the General’s day have been teetotal. The Larmer Tree Grounds certainly were. By the time I discovered the museum it was decrepit, ill kempt, ill frequented. Its heyday was long gone. Indeed I never saw another visitor. Seventy years previously a thousand people had come here each month. Nearly all those witnesses to the distant past were now dead.
So too was its singular sometime curator Trelawney Dayrell Reed. The rooms were harshly skylit. Many of the painted objects, drawings, manuscripts and fabrics were faded from an excess of sunlight. The ambient brightness was unnerving. There were impressive dunes of dust in the cabinets. Paleness abounded. The rooms were almost monochromatic, approximately bleached putty. Were there shrunken heads and craniometrical drawings and stuffed monkeys? Inventories of the long since dispersed collections include these and countless other items of ethnographic bric-a-brac. I have no memory of anything other than the issue of the chalk surrounds, of my soil. My soil. Mine … which I came in early adolescence to realise was not mine, it was another lie, it was not part of me, it was not connected to my blood, whatever that meant.
This pernicious patrimony was determined by chance, by my parents having made their home in Salisbury because that was where my father had been posted by William Crawford & Sons Ltd – biscuits determine destiny. Even had they come from ‘Salisbury families’, incuriously immobile vertical groupings stretching back generations, I would still not have owned roots. Roots are illusory chains suturing man and mineral. It’s the easiest thing in the world to cast them off: we are not vegetables. My appetite for ancient artefacts was not conditional on an ersatz ancestral bond with stone-age mumblers or ragged beaker folk or woaden berserkers rupturing a deer’s chest to feast on the still-beating heart. (I had no more taste then for venison than I have now.) I prided myself, rather, on appreciating artefacts with a reasoned objectivity and an obedient understanding of history’s rigid taxonomy, of periods and ages – including prehistory which implied that history began at a definitive point before which it had presumably been in utero.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 31
